


Frigid

by Guede



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Dark Fairy Tale Elements, Dom/sub Undertones, Dubious Morality, Horror, Hunters & Hunting, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Self-Destruction, Sheriff Stilinski's Name is John, Slow Build, Unhealthy Relationships, Winter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-26
Updated: 2018-03-27
Packaged: 2019-04-08 05:49:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 14,616
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14098611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Guede/pseuds/Guede
Summary: That winter the snow is so thick on the ground that people put halters on their livestock, those of them that still have any, to have something they can haul the beasts back by when the drifts swallow them.  Animals are shortsighted, but it still makes Chris wonder.  Why they go into the snow, when there’s no hope of grazing, and no shelter from the chill sapping the life out of everyone.  The cold’s just made them mad is all he can think, but he doesn’t understand that, going mad in that way.  Not till later.Chris goes into the woods, gets hurt, and is found by someone.  And then it isn’t so clear.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I've deliberately not tagged this for a few major elements because they would spoil the plot twists. General warning that this is intended to be a horror story.

That winter the snow is so thick on the ground that people put halters on their livestock, those of them that still have any, to have something they can haul the beasts back by when the drifts swallow them. Animals are shortsighted, but it still makes Chris wonder. Why they go into the snow, when there’s no hope of grazing, and no shelter from the chill sapping the life out of everyone. The cold’s just made them mad is all he can think, but he doesn’t understand that, going mad in that way. Not till later.

* * *

It’s not their first winter without Victoria, but it’s the worst and they don’t have enough from the farm to make it through and don’t have enough money to buy the difference. And he won’t go to what’s left of his family.

“I was down at the tavern, and there was a man who’d just come through the pass and he says it’s even worse there,” his daughter says, crouched before the hearth. The fire throws a sour yellow glaze over her frown, which deepens as she rearranges the sticks to burn more slowly. “He talked about a family whose house was buried in the snow, and by the time the neighbors noticed their fire was out, they’d all frozen to death. He said they had to put the bodies by a fire for hours and hours before they’d thawed enough to unbend and put into coffins.”

The leather under Chris’ fingers is brittle and dry, cracks webbing out over its surface when he bends the strap around his thumb. He rubs oil into it but the cold makes it too thick, more like paste. It won’t sink into the leather but he presses down with the rag anyway, scrubbing at the saddle. “Waste of time. Can’t dig graves till the spring anyway.”

A log on the fire snaps in two, sending up tails of sparks behind his daughter as she stalks towards him. She looks more and more like her mother these days, iron and spitfire, like one of the old goddesses who still command the odd bloodstained stone in the hills. When she swerves abruptly to take up his boots, he lets out a breath.

“I don’t like this,” she says. She bends over, tugging each loop of the laces to test their strength, and a lock of hair slips from behind her ear to soften the plane of her cheek, remind her father how soft and dewy with youth it is. “Even the trappers are leaving. Barely anybody lives up there when it’s good, and if something happens to you, it could be—could be _months_ before we’d know—”

Her voice breaks despite the iron in it and his heart with it. He breathes out again, noting the pain, and then takes the saddle off his knee and turns to her. Reaches out, puts his hands over hers, and when her head comes up, wildness coming out in her eyes behind the damp lashes, he slides the boots from her hands. He’s her father, his heart has been breaking for her since the day the midwife laid the small bundle in his arms.

“I’ll be back before the stream melts,” he tells her. “You’ll mind here—and I mean mind it, and leave the McCalls alone. He’ll have his own problems, him and his mother—”

“He said they’d be more than happy to have us both,” she mutters stubbornly. Her fist presses back her skirts as she stands from him, makes as if to sweep back while he drags on one boot, then the other. Then she inhales sharply. “I’ll keep the farm for you. And _you_.”

He looks up. She stares at him, his daughter, tall and grown and ripe and yet not grown at all, little more than a child. Her hands twist in her skirts: long-fingered, nimble, strength behind their grace. They could kill him. He’s taught them that. 

“You’ll be back early,” she tells him firmly. Orders him, and the familiar echoes in her voice make his skin prickle. “Early, with a stack of furs higher than me. And then we’ll be all right.”

They both know, but he’s her father, after all. So he can only say: “Yes.”

* * *

It takes him nearly a week to reach the smallest of the foothills, where the villages have dwindled down to those too old or poor to live elsewhere. They tell him, the few who are willing to come out of their homes, that he’d be mad to go any further. Trees who have outlasted empires are cracking under the weight of the snow on their branches, deer have been found with mouths torn to ribbons by the ice they’ve been driven to eat. Even furs aren’t worth it, dying out there.

They’re no fools, and yet he travels on. There have been worse winters. His family’s handed down the tales generation over generation, knowing that even when people die, the wilderness carries on. And in the deepest heart of the mountains, during the most terrible of winters, is where the fur of the bear grows richest and thickest. When it might come not only in the browns and blacks demanded by the rich, but in the rarest cream, a color that has paid for armies and earned kingdoms. A pelt that’d lift him and his daughter out of poverty and away from a town that hates them for the sins of his father.

“Heard that too, when I was a boy,” says an old, old man, his elbows hanging by his knees even when he stands. His teeth chatter in Chris’ face as he refills Chris’ cup with the thin, sour coffee he’s made out of the handful of beans Chris gave him for a night’s lodging, and the cold turns his spittle to stony flecks that skate harmlessly off Chris’ cheeks. “You’ll find them, maybe. Maybe it’s worth the risk. But there are other things living in those mountains, things that don’t feel the cold, and now there’s nobody to keep them down where they should be.”

Chris wraps both hands around his mug. Even so, he can see the fingers of ice creeping out over the coffee. “You mean monsters?”

“ _You_ know,” the old man says, and Chris’ shoulders hitch tight before he sees the man’s back turned towards him, hears the impersonality in the man’s concern. “You know, you all know, even living in your fancy towns and thinking out here we’re just jumping at our own shadows for lack of brains—call ‘em whatever you like, but—”

“Quiet, now,” says the old woman living here. She’s taken her own advice up till now, little more than an upright bundle of faded calico against the wall nearest the fire. She looks across the room at Chris and he can pick out the glitter of her eyes, and then she turns. Bends to scoop a fresh stick of firewood from its box and then twists to prod it into the hearth. 

The leaping fire washes out her clothes, washes out the old man’s as well, so they’re little more than shades against the dull mud-brown wall. Still, the man’s voice comes through strong and brassy: “Wolves, at least. Nobody doesn’t know about the wolves, and how they come down, straight in the door. You can’t tell me you haven’t heard about that.”

Chris relaxes and drinks his coffee, pressing his thumb over the edge to crack through the ice gathering about the rim. “I’ve hunted wolves before,” he says.

“Have you?” The old man looks at him, then smiles, wide enough to crack the withered face and allow a few glimpses of the younger, braver man who had once sat by that fire and built a house around it. “All right, all right. Guess you know.”

The wind picks up, and in the stable a loose shutter bangs and bangs till Chris’ horse vies with the couple’s ox to bellow at it. Cursing, the old man takes up half a split log and struggles through the doorway.

Chris drains his cup and then stands up. The firelight plays over a box of tools in the corner, and from it he takes a hammer, chipped all about the head but still serviceable. He can hear the old man growing breathless even from here, and the gusts of cold coming from the broken shutter are rough enough to threaten their fire.

“It’s so quiet,” the old woman says as Chris starts to pass her. He thinks she’s speaking to herself, as the elderly often do, but then he thinks the better of it and looks over, and finds her staring steadily back at him. “You don’t know that till it happens, how quiet it can get. How silent it is, with not even your heart—they never tell you that. He’s never known—he never heard.”

“I’ll keep an eye and an ear out for them,” Chris says. “They can’t help speaking to each other, sooner or later, and then—”

When he stoops to look her in the eye, she turns her face from him, into the folds of her shawl. Some strange, half-tired, half-impatient expression passes over her; the hint of malice to it is merely the firelight. “It’s quiet,” she says once again, so softly her lips barely move. “Away from the wolves.”

Chris frowns at her, but she says nothing more. And then the shutter bangs again, and he turns away with the hammer. That matters more, fixing the window tonight. In the morning, when they’ve all seen that they’ve survived another night, he may ask.

* * *

He forgets to ask. In the morning the horse needs to be warmed up and well-ice needs to be cracked to fill his flasks, and the old woman is only another old woman, watching wordlessly from the doorway as yet another transient flits in and out of her life. She has her own chores to demand her attention, and by the time Chris’ horse turns into the meager trail, she’s bent to the snow encroaching on her house, a chipped bowl her shovel.

* * *

In the cold it isn’t easy to think beyond the next step. The ice sinks into Chris’ bones, then seems to tighten them so that his limbs naturally draw up towards each other. He has to remind himself to lift his chin from his chest, take away his warming breath and suffer the chilly waft against his breast so he can peer out at the world. His eyes are slow to pick out the shadows in the white drifts everywhere. His mind is even slower. To keep himself awake, he mumbles each step of making the coming night’s camp, but then it is so very tempting to think only of that routine.

But he has little to remark on, in truth. Hunting bears in winter does not require much of a trail. They’re all asleep in their dens, and to find a den is merely a matter of reading the rocks and soil and looking for the right slopes. All he has to do is travel to them.

It takes days, and there are no more houses, not even abandoned ones. The terrain is too rough for anyone to set up a permanent lodging. For a time he finds sites that may have once been frequented by other travelers, perhaps hunters like himself: overhangs with cinderpits scooped out beneath them, piles of brush positioned as windbreaks. But then even those dwindle away, and he’s left forcing virgin ways through the snow-coated woods.

There comes a point where Chris dismounts for the night, and in the morning he finds that the land is too dangerous for him to climb back into the saddle. Instead he must lead his horse, weakened and cantankerous as it’s become with the poor browsing. His progress drops from miles a day to feet.

And yet. He reaches the promising slopes, and finds somewhere to shelter his horse while he stalks the mountain for those puffs of rank, blood-warm air rising out of the bears’ airholes. He’s never warm now, not even when he crouches with his toes nearly in the ashes of his campfire, the flames teasing at his brows. The cold wraps around his bones and hardens into an impenetrable layer, and then washes over them again, building up over itself. It feels like what he sees when he chops through the ice here, thin sheets of blue and white staggered over each other.

He thinks about his daughter, and how one bear pelt will buy her the clothes to hold her head high against the rest of the village, pitying as they are of a motherless, dowerless child, who has little to offer except for the rumors about her family and the glimpses of her unwomanly ways. Two will buy them both passage to the closest of the walled towns, where they’d be able to market some of their less conventional services, to those who’ve never heard the name ‘Argent.’ He doesn’t dare to think of three; he’s felt enough stings in his life to not go looking for uncalled-for pains.

It’s more than enough, he thinks. She’s more than enough—to give her a better, broader life, uncompromised by the choices that others have made for themselves. And yet.

He stands knee-deep in the drifts, gazing out over the wide, silent wilderness. The snow deadens sound as well as feeling, deadens all his senses so that he seems like nothing. Like less even than a spare, leafless branch thrusting upward from the snow. Like nothing, with no name and no history, in this place. And he has never been one to turn his face to the wall, hasn’t ever thought to throw himself away cheaply. He’s been taught, and then brought himself up over the years, what the price for people like himself is, and what are the prices that he can set for those who might cross his path. It’s still his way. And yet.

Chris shakes his head. Stamps his feet and moves his arms, the dampness of his breath turning to prickly crystals against his clothes, and then he pushes himself on. One bear, at the least. That’s all he and his daughter need to put things right. One.

* * *

The bear is simple to kill. Drowsy and winter-stunned in its den, it puts up little fight, and the most work comes when Chris hauls it out of the ground—his horse is too weak to be set to the burden, barely managing as it is to stumble back and forth to water. It’s too much weight for only one man, and he’s forced to skin the body in parts, dismembering it as he goes. He carries out the limbs and the heads, leaving the bloody pelt behind, and distributes them in all directions around the den. Even in this empty land, there may be killers, and he wants to be careful.

He buries the parts in the snow, and kicks fresh powder over the dulling scarlet streaks in his trail. Otherwise the vultures and the buzzards will come, and where they circle, wolves are likely to follow. He wants to have the pelt freed and rolled up to take back to his camp, where he can treat it properly, before that happens.

And he does manage it, but in his caution, he decides to return a last time to the den to close up the entrance, and it’s then when the wildcat comes upon him.

Chris doesn’t see it. He feels it: teeth in his shoulder, claws dragging through his trousers, the weight flinging him into the snow and the icy shock slamming into his back and up through his body. 

They fall into the entrance to the den. One of his legs catches the top of the hole as he goes down, twisting him over. He can feel the bone give, that sun-bright _wrench_ in the backs of his eyes as he slams his forearm up into the cat’s breast. Blood washes down inside his furs and the fingers of one hand jerk against the cat’s ruff as if something else has gotten into Chris, some evil spirit—the spirit of the cat, working against him, trying to push his will away.

Then they go numb. The cat’s shredding through his layers, easily riding over his struggling. It’s too heavy for him to throw off by main face and he’s losing so much blood. He can’t reach his knife—if he lets go of the cat’s neck, all it has to do is twist its jaws and close them around his throat and he’ll be dead. Dead here and his daughter left on a farm with no money and no one to stand beside her, not when the villagers come, not when the rest of their family comes, not when the others—

He can’t. He heaves all the breath out of his lungs, a ‘hah!’ that punches through his middle, and flings them over to the side to smash the cat’s head against a rocky spur sticking out of the dirt. Then again. And again. The cat snarls and he can feel its tongue move against his flesh, a soft touch behind the fangs rocking ever more deeply into his shoulder. He screams, he thinks.

Everything is so white.

The cat slips on him. Staggers. He drags his fingers against its ruff and twists again, but he can’t feel the fur under his fingers anymore, can’t even feel the warmth of the beast’s body. All he can feel is the pressure of the muscle working against him, and he.

He must. He must get back.

He beats the cat’s head against the rock again and again, till he can’t feel anything anymore. He must. He must. He.

White.

* * *

He thinks on it later, when he has the time—has all the time to, and yet he doesn’t try to create memories that never were, to use their pretenses as comfort, or as excuse. And there truly wasn’t anything, not even the cat. Only the quiet snow, thrown over him like a shroud. That’s all he saw, before.

* * *

Yellow. Like butter, in the late summer, when the grasses are their richest and you can see it in the milk. That warm, velvety yellow, that you can feel running silkily over your fingers even before you touch it.

The yellow spot grows, gains reds and oranges and even the occasional ribbon of blue. It’s a fire, crackling away behind a half-circle of stones the size of a man’s fist, about fifteen feet away from Chris’ head. He twists towards it and then gasps as suddenly the world rips him open from gullet to belly and then caves into him. 

“Stop that,” someone tells him, holding him down as his limbs rattle and try to rise off the ground. They press him at the breast and the hip, with a blurry fringe of hair between them, above Chris. “Stop it. You’ll break it all over again. Just breathe through it— _breathe_.”

Pain does that to you. People don’t think about it, and then when they do, when they’re feeling it, when they know…they forget again, because forgetfulness is the cheapest panacea for your troubles. It _hurts_ , hurts like a river of ice and white-hot fire, sluicing around inside Chris with no rhyme or rhythm. His thighs, his shoulder, his left elbow, his right knee. They all flare in turn, and in between the points of agony he twists in the wind, because you can’t let it out so you move instead. It moves you.

“Come on, breathe,” says whoever is with him. Sharp, low, the grinding force on him slowly shaping into palms and fingers and thumbs. “Breathe. Open your mouth. _Open_ \--you remember how to do this, and in and—”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Chris says. 

Or maybe it’s, “ _Help_ ” or “ _Stop_ ” or “ _Hate_.” He can’t tell. It’s not a real sound, what forces itself past his lips as his body abruptly shudders into acquiescence. It’s a punch of air, into the air, and when it comes back down onto him, like the lightest graze of dandelion fluff touching his face—he sags and thinks he will never rise from this spot again.

“All right,” says the man with him. 

The timbre of the voice comes first, followed by ovals shaping themselves in the dark. A man, leaning over him, with a strange drift of shadow across his eyes. Then he lifts a hand and pushes it away, and the firelight paints the hair between his fingers that yellow, a yellow Chris thinks he can feel running into the dried-out cracks of his mouth. His other hand stays on Chris’ hip for a few seconds as he studies Chris. Then it rises, touches a bulky bandage at Chris’ shoulder so that the tight weighty clasp of it is suddenly present around Chris’ throat.

He looks up and past Chris. There was no sound, not that Chris heard, but he knows it was there from the way alertness thins the man’s lips, stiffens his shoulders. Then, still looking up, the man puts his hand down on Chris’ other shoulder. He presses for a second before rising and turning away towards the fire.

Chris turns his head and as his gaze falls on the curl of the man’s back, squatted by the hearth, his eyes close again.

* * *

Flickers in and out like the fire. The rasp of a callused thumb pulling his lower lip down to make him drink water. Brilliant agony as the splints around his leg are jarred, and in the background, the muted mutter of an apology, angry with guilt. The taste of rabbit—rabbit, he knows it, he knows his game, he knows rabbit and he knows the catch was a plump one, a rabbit who’d done well in the fall and who still had the fat to leave stickiness on his mouth after the hands cradle his head back down to the blankets.

And: he still is a hunter, even half-conscious and hurting.

And: he still is a man who remembers how it is to be hunted, and who it was who hunted him.

No one should live here. It’s not that kind of land, he knows that, and yet he sees things. The hearth in a cave, a cave that lets a few beams of natural light spill across its floor during the day, yet that has nary a draft, or the prickling, bitter taste of smoke in the back of the throat. The thick skins that pad him from the stone, the constant stream of rich broth pouring down his throat, broth that would be the pride of a far wealthier house than Chris has ever seen, even at his family’s height, but in the dead of winter and the middle of a wasteland.

And: he thinks there are two of them.

* * *

Chris’ right leg and left arm are unusable, and his right arm unreliable. Nevertheless he pushes his back up the curve of the wall, and waits, body trembling, for his host to return.

The man knows before he even raises his head. His shoulders hitch slightly, mid-step, though he saves the surprise for when he and Chris match gazes. “Decide you’ll come around for good?” the man says a second later, a touch wry, a touch disapproving. “Yesterday you were still fainting mid-piss.”

Inside of Chris’ shoulder it feels as if a knot of needles is slowly rotating, tearing slits in him with every breath. He can’t help the edge in his voice. “Who are you?”

The man is tall and broad-shouldered, with an ease in the way that he lifts a heavy kettle away from the fire and carries it across the room. He’s not young, but neither has life rasped and withered the looks from him. “About time for introductions,” he says, with a dip of his head, and kneels down by Chris’ bed with a ladle. “Name’s John. And to be fair, I have gotten a couple names from you already, but you don’t really look like a Victoria or Allison to me—”

He stops and watches Chris flinch. He’s charming, in a place where no one should have the time or thought for it. And beyond that, he—he regrets the comment, Chris can see that in the way his eyes shadow, the suddenness with which he scoops up some soup and the care with which he lifts it to Chris’ mouth, his free hand cupped under to catch the dribble. But sympathy is even more out of place here.

“You lost a lot of blood,” John eventually says.

Chris grimaces. He knows. His head is spinning, just sitting here, and he can barely incline it to the ladle. Unclamping his lips means a dull ache fingers the flesh behind his jaw, high up near the joint.

Deer today, Chris thinks as he swallows. And something—little flecks that catch in his teeth and then dissolve to nothing when he worries them with his tongue. After the third ladle, he manages to trap one against the roof of his mouth and he tries to trace it out with his tongue-tip, but it’s been chopped too finely for him to identify the herb.

“I’ve been going around, and I found your camp and your horse—had to knock it on the head, sorry.” John half-turns, steadying the kettle with one hand as he gently pumps the ladle in the broth. Chris can’t twist to see but he can smell the change, feel it sting his nose: ginger. “Would’ve just prolonged the misery if I hadn’t. Anyway, I didn’t see anything that looked like—”

“There aren’t,” Chris hisses. Not out of malice. He knows better than to show that, with him crippled here and the other man so hale Chris still half-wonders if he’s dreaming it all, dying out there with a dead wildcat on top of him. It’s only he can’t speak any louder, or any sweeter. “Just me.”

The next ladle that John feeds him has more of the herbs in it, a trace of astringency that cuts pleasantly through the layer of molten fat pooled on top. And the ginger, it softens in the fat so that it warms instead of burns, fortifying the little blood that’s still left in Chris. He can’t help lipping at it and the broth trickles over the edge of the ladle, as if he’s an old toothless man gumming at it.

He looks up, the back of John’s finger touching him on the chin. John watches steadily back and swipes away the dribble. “Well, glad there’s no worry,” John says. “Not likely to be alive, if there had been anybody else. We’ve had a couple bad storms since and even the elk are freezing to death.”

A couple—Chris bites back the urge to ask how long, and concentrates on drinking the soup. He shifts his head barely more than a hair but the movement still passes down his chest and into his legs. The right one twitches, and then cramps in truth, lashing out at the lack of activity till he thinks he can feel the ends of the broken bone chipping each other.

When it stops, the ladle is sitting in the kettle and John has him pinned to the wall. John’s breath is warm as the broth, and though he’s as pale as someone hunkered down in this land would be, the effort of holding Chris has put a lively flush into his cheeks and throat.

“You don’t have to look,” Chris manages to gasp. “Don’t look.”

“All right,” John says. His eyes move up and down Chris; when Chris’ chest hitches, a remnant pain twisting up behind the breastbone, they drop there and narrow. He flexes his hands, but then thinks the better of it and sits back. “They waiting for you somewhere else?”

Chris closes his eyes—almost. He can’t shut them all the way, when he does his head feels liable to topple off his neck, so he leaves a sliver at the bottom where the butter-yellow leaks in. Something moves across it and he nearly jumps before he realizes it’s just John’s hands, taking up the kettle. A second later he hears John’s footsteps walking back across the room.

“You don’t need to look,” Chris says. “It’s just me.”

“Get some rest,” John tells him. The fire spits and barks, and the yellow turns scarlet as John builds it up. “You have nothing to do anyway except sleep through it, you know.”

Chris opens his eyes. The other man is still by the fire, restacking the logs. He watches as sparks burst upward. A few land on the back of John’s hand and he jerks it back, then presses it to his mouth as he continues poking at the fire with his other hand. He shouldn’t be here, Chris thinks. If he wasn’t here, Chris would be dead.

It made Chris sick to his stomach, the effort of sitting up. He’s got a belly of broth now, and he needs to keep it in his belly. He closes his eyes again, and half-dozes till John gives up on waiting and comes back and lays him down on his bed. It hurts, and then he’s tired, and then he falls asleep.

* * *

John sets out bowls the next time. Two of them. He leaves one by the fire to stay warm and uses the other one for Chris.

“You came all the way out here for bear?” he asks.

He’d gone to Chris’ camp. Seen the fur—and there had been some meat, Chris remembers. He hadn’t buried all of it. Some of it he’d meant to eat. But there hasn’t been any bear meat in the broth, not since Chris has been able to stay awake.

“The white ones,” Chris mutters. “Need the money.”

“Hunting, that’s what you do,” John says. Conclusion, not question. He sounds satisfied, as if Chris sided with him in an argument. “Still, that’s a hell of a reason to come out here. Not that many would.”

Chris nods, and then half-closes his eyes with exhaustion as John wipes his mouth and then starts to pick at the bandages around his shoulder. They need to be changed once a day. John packs the wound with moss and cobwebs and some kind of paste, and since Chris isn’t raving with bone-fever or watching his arm blacken with rot, it must work. But it hurts—it will hurt, once the bandage is off, and in the quiet moment before it does, Chris wishes he could catch the breath for it.

“You been doing it long?”

“Long enough to know what I’m doing,” Chris mutters, and then a bandage sticks to him and he hisses at the slow-hot burn of its drag against his skin. The room around him tilts its axis and he puts his head back against the wall, breathes deep. “What about you? What are you after?”

Too blunt. He should try, at least, to sound curious, not accusing. He is a hunter, he claims to be one.

He looks over, squinting against the dizziness, and thinks John maybe didn’t stop, maybe just kept tugging at the bandages. The man’s tongue is showing, a little sliver of it poking from between his lips, as he slides a finger under the strip and flakes away the dried blood holding it down. The graze of his nail feels like the licking start of lightning. “Got caught, like an idiot,” John mutters, wrapping the loose end of the bandage about his wrist as he goes. “Just…crossing the pass, got lost.”

Chris puts his head back against the wall. “Nearest pass…that’s a good week’s travel from here. In summer, good weather.”

The corner of John’s mouth twists. “Yeah, like I said, idiot. Didn’t really have a—anyway, you don’t want to hear about my problems.”

“Because I’m…going somewhere.” When John looks over, Chris remembers his chest hurts when he breathes, and doesn’t snort, just raises his brows. “Soon.”

John faces him. Not looks—the angle, the way the firelight spills across the room, it keeps the other man’s face black with barely the shine of eyes to break it. Chris can’t tell if the man looks at him.

And then there’s a rasp, and John twists his head, sharply liquid, with something about the stretch of his shoulders that speaks of amusement even before the light pulls across his face, pooling on the white teeth of his smile. “All right,” he says, nodding, knowing Chris has him cornered. “Yeah. Not much of an explanation.”

He puts his hands on Chris. Spreads his palm across the front flat of Chris’ shoulder, the good one, pinning it back against the wall as he bends down, peers at the wounds on the other one. His fingertips touch at the edges, light but even then it’s enough pressure to stretch the skin, pull at the dried crusts of blood and paste. Long twists of pain drag down from them, burrowing into Chris’ torso and then catching at his pelvis so he jerks his hips upward. He only keeps from kneeing John because he’s so weak.

Weak and fevered, all of a sudden. He’s been free of that so far, mercifully, but now sweat steams off his brow and cheeks and the point of his chin. John slides a nail under an oblong flake of dried paste and the tug of it hooks Chris in the middle of his gut, and he humps up and John makes a soothing noise at him, smooths that palm over his shoulder and the side of his chest and then back up to his shoulder. John’s breath puffs against his mauled shoulder, warm, moist, and Chris exhales suddenly. Stares at the man through a haze.

“All right so far,” John murmurs, and then he twists aside, leans past Chris. His hand slips from Chris’ shoulder, but still rests easy, in its new place against the pectoral, where Chris’ heart can thump up against its palm. Then he sits back, with the fresh bandages and the bowl of new paste. “Let’s get you cleaned and wrapped, and back to bed.”

A week away, Chris thinks, even as his head spins and his body shivers. A week. It’s too far. Nobody gets that lost, they’d have to come this way on purpose. Or they would’ve turned back by now, at least. Gone back the way they’d come.

Hunting. He hunts things. Has hunted things. People. He knows how to do it, what to look for.

He keeps looking at the slope of John’s shoulders, the way they flex and spread and drop as John dresses his wounds. The pack of the muscle under the man’s shirt. His eyes dig into the weave of the cloth, the tiny holes in between warp and weft. He shouldn’t, he—it’s going to be noticed, the way he looks, and he shouldn’t be noticed. He should notice—should _think_. He.

“The train broke up,” John says, with his hands curled under Chris’ arms, both of them. Flat to Chris’ ribs, their fingers curling along the bones as Chris struggles with his daze. “Pack train, made a bet we could cross this late and lost it, and it just scattered. You know how people are, sometimes? When they think they’re going to die, and just want somebody else to—”

“Yes,” Chris says. His breath catches. He’s gasping now, swaying as John lifts him off the wall, and his head swings into the other man’s breath, swings over that broad shoulder, and pain lances up his leg and through his shoulder out his back and he wants to collapse into and tear out of the other man all at the same time. “Ye—yeah. All right.”

John breathes in and out. Natural, no strain, and he chuckles again as he lays Chris down, pulls the blankets over. “Got your fur pickling,” he says. “Did take the salt with me.”

“Saw it coming?” Chris mutters.

“Well, sometimes you do,” John says. His hand presses down on Chris’ side. Then he stands and leaves the room.

He doesn’t take the other bowl. It’s still there, still full, sitting in front of the hearth as Chris dozes off.

* * *

How long Chris is there. How long he’s already been there. He doesn’t know, can’t tell. He can see the days pass from the way the sunlight dips in and out of the cave, but he can’t count them.

Well, he could. He should try. His leg is broken and his shoulder is torn up, but neither of those would stop him. But he’s tired. He loses track, when he remembers to think about it in the first place. All he wants is to curl up with his ache and his daze and sleep till he stops thinking about how he should think of how long he’s been here. With his daughter waiting—

He thinks he’s so weak. Too weak. He sleeps so much.

When does John eat, or sleep? He can’t stay awake to see.

He _wants_ to sleep, that’s the problem. And the longer he’s here, the harder it is to think of it as a problem.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You need to drink water, even in the winter. Thirst can and does drive animals (and people!) to do crazy things when all of the easily-accessible water is frozen. Also, one strange symptom of hypothermia is paradoxical undressing, where people think they're burning up even when their body temperature is dangerously low and start ripping off their clothes, among other disoriented and delirious behavior.


	2. Chapter 2

John clicks his tongue, reproving. “You’re going to snap it again.”

“I got it,” Chris grunts, and then his arm, his _good_ arm, fails under him and he tumbles from half-sitting. His leg jerks out and the wall is there and the splint won’t do a damn thing, he knows that and he clamps down on his teeth and.

Before the pain hits, John seizes him about the waist and then drags him over and half up the other man’s torso. It jars his shoulder but only his foot scrapes the wall, and the pain is bad but it’s not a rebreak. They both know that.

They lean together. Chris’ head against John’s breast, the smell of the man coming up through the half-laced front of his shirt. Earthy—not full of mold or damp, like you’d think from living for days and weeks in a cave. Warm. Chris can trace the shadow of a vein snaking up over the round of a collarbone wing.

“Can guess you’re eager to wash off some of this dirt, but you go like that and you’ll be stuck down here past spring,” John says, and then he moves his hands, presses aside the sheet sticking to Chris’ thigh, and picks Chris up.

Out of the room, into another. The main cavern, with a sharp draft blowing in that makes Chris hiss and huddle into the other man, even as he realizes they’re only heading _into_ the draft. The snow is there, that’s the water, he guesses.

“Careful, there’s a…yeah. Sorry.” John steers them around a battered wooden crate. Empty, Chris thinks, and then John catches his shin around it and under the cursing Chris can hear a rattle. “I know it’s a mess in here.”

Firewood, stacked loosely so that that the drafts will dry it out. A few more boxes, covered with skins—Chris spots his bear, out of the pickling salt and stretched between rock pillars, with barrels beneath it. Some planks boxing them in—maybe once part of a wagon’s bed. John chuckles into the space behind his ear and his shoulder burns and so does his throat.

“All right, just lean,” John says, turning into the sag of Chris’ body. His foot comes up every so often, under Chris’ faltering ones, and pushes them along till they’ve reached a small firepit with a steaming kettle over it, tucked behind a slight niche in the cave wall. “Still cold, I know, but there’s nowhere in your room to drain off the water and I can’t spare anything to soak it up with.”

Chris shrugs, because he hadn’t even thought to protest. He’s already panting, and his brow leaves a damp streak in John’s shirt as they ease him down the other man’s body onto the floor. Then a gust of wind blasts him in the face, cutting through even his daze, and he flinches back. Clamps his fingers into John’s arm.

“Hey,” John says, soothing, not pained. Man stills himself, hands just resting against Chris, enough to hold Chris up.

Nothing makes him falter, Chris thinks, not for the first time. And Chris still is half-convinced this is just a dying man’s fancies, because no one could be that—that _easy_ , and then he sees the crate John had knocked off, and the pair of boots spilling out of it.

He stares at them. He’s too weak for much else, true, limp as a newborn as John lays him down, pushes his limbs about the blanket the man’s thought to spread out beforehand. And he keeps not quite—thinking. He stares at the boots. They’re well-worn, one with a broken lace. He can see the threads in the frayed end, and then the other boot, with its sole turned towards him, he can see where the bottom’s been torn and notched from rough ground.

“Can you just lift a little—no?” John laughs, low and unconstructed, as his hand rides Chris’ jerked twist as smoothly as a well-honed knife across fine leather. Then his fingers turn and scoop under Chris’ arm, lifting it as a warm, wet, nubbled clump brushes over Chris’ side. “All right, I’ll do it for you. Just do me a favor, keep breathing.”

He rubs Chris down like a mare who’s just foaled will her offspring, careful but meaning to peel off what came before, make it clear it’s a new world. It feels good, feels rough, it brings the blood up into Chris’ skin so that he flushes and gasps into the cool air, continuing to twist as John works over his hips, down his legs. Back up to his belly and then his back, turning him over so that he can twitch at the huff of the man over him.

And he’s still looking at those boots. They’re…they’re not that far away. Couple yards. His eyesight’s still good. He’s spent a lot of time looking at John, for lack of anything else to do. Shoulders, arms, feet. For lack of—he bites the inside of his mouth, and the heat of his blood on his tongue shouldn’t surprise him, but it does.

“Chris?” John says, too sudden and close and sharp. He’s right there, when Chris moves his head, right over him, and as Chris jerks back John’s hand wraps under his jaw. Careful. Always careful. But that’s not the same as _gentle_. “You can’t keep yourself together, I’ll cut this sh—”

“Where are they?” Chris says. Boots are too small.

John stills. His lips half-parted but his brows have leaped beyond the question, his brows and his eyes and his stare and he is too calm, he’s been too calm this entire time. He’s been looking back, all this time, and—

“My son got hurt in a landslide,” John says quietly. He traces the line of Chris’ nose with his gaze, so close that Chris feels the flutter against his nostrils, can’t help but flare them out, and then John sits up. Gives Chris his shoulder, dipping the rag back in the kettle. “And like I said, our group didn’t part on the best terms. I’m just—you have a daughter. You left her, so you could come out here?”

“I taught her,” Chris snaps. Can’t help himself. And then he—he thinks, for once. “Left her with her mother.”

John looks back. Doesn’t move his body, except for the arm stirring the rag around and his head. He looks like he understands.

Blood in Chris’ mouth. Like he’s hunting, like he’s an _animal_ , like he isn’t a man with responsibilities that he’s carried since he knew enough to realize—he presses his cheek to the ground. The bare ground, he’s shifted enough so that the blanket’s not in the way. It’s cold and hard and he thinks banging his head into it wouldn’t hurt nearly as much.

He thinks, or a part of him thinks, so dreamy that he wonders if it’s really him and not just a stray into his mind—he thinks he wouldn’t mind if it stopped. If at some point he just didn’t have to anymore, and he was just lying here and John was there and he was looking at the man and.

John leans over him again, drops pattering Chris’ hip as John wrings the rag a little, waves it so it won’t burn when it touches—he _understands_ , damn him—and Chris closes his eyes. “I did teach her,” he mutters. “She knows what to do. Even with her mother gone, and me off…I want to help her get out, that’s all. She doesn’t need me now.”

“I think that’s what you tell yourself, when you’re worried and you need something to help you sleep,” John says. Not casual, but like he’s put thought into it. He’s not angry or insulting, he’s just thought about it. “You think, if I did my job, then…yeah, I did my job. And they’ll take it from there, and I won’t have to worry anymore.”

Chris opens his eyes and the darkened inside of the cave slides by him as John pulls him up against the other man’s front, puts his head against that broad shoulder and squeezes a thick fold of the rag up against the back of his neck. Digs into the line of the muscle, leading up into his scalp, and it’s like he dug his fingers down the whole curve of Chris’ spine, all the way down, spreading out into flesh that’s tight-knotted so bad it stings Chris’ eyes to let them let go, let them loosen and unravel.

“You can’t really go anywhere,” John adds. “I know that, I just—I guess it’s just he’s all I have. And he’s hurt and out here, at this time of year, it’s just so slow, him mending, and—”

“I know,” Chris says, closing his eyes again. A thumb presses against the tendons in the side of his neck and his head pushes up John’s shoulder against it, stretching out his throat for the other man. He doesn’t even think about it. “I know.”

John sighs. “He’s sleeping, most of the time. You won’t see him, any more than I’m going to see your daughter.”

There’s something—Chris’ eyes crack open. He doesn’t want them to. He wants to stay, shirking his duties and all that he is (all that he tries to be, wants to be, still hopes to be, despite knowing better), sleeping, someone wrapped around him with that warm stroke around his throat, and never mind what else it could do to him. He is _tired_ , he thinks. And Allison, he’s taught her and—

John’s right, he thinks. Makes him feel better.

He closes his eyes.

* * *

Not voices, it wasn’t the voices. They were there, at the edge of his consciousness, flicks and flashes of conversation, John’s low one and the other one, the higher, more anxious one. Or the way John minds someone who isn’t within sight, listening for them, angling his body so that he keeps himself between Chris and them. But Chris thinks he knew even before that, and even before the boots. 

He’s learned to study them. How they move, how they handle themselves. How they can come into a town, soft and inconspicuous, so that no one bats an eye till they’re ready for it. Or worse, how they’ll come in, there, no denying it, but still no one raises the alarm, no one lifts a finger and points and calls out what everyone can see. Because they’ve come in so sweetly that even when they’re on the doorstep, there is no warning. Instead there’s an open door, and welcoming arms, and the best place by the fire, even as all the lights in the house start to dim.

Chris has seen it before. Hunted it before. _Cared_ about it before, when it happened. Cared about stopping it.

He knows he’s not untouchable, knows he has the same weaknesses as any other man. In way he guesses he’s been expecting it all along, ever since he drove that iron rod into his father’s corpse and then nailed the coffin lid down over it. But he’s still…surprised. That it’s so easy.

* * *

A bath, even if it’s only by towel, and Chris feels half-revived. His body does too, and he wishes it didn’t, with the sudden catalog of problems it presents. The shoulder and the leg were nightmares but in the waking world, here, he has the scrapes and the bruises and the cramps. The stiff muscles in his palms, from him pushing against them all the time, crawling around. The hangnail on the third toe of his right foot that catches whenever he twists on his bed, the damned feeling in his left ear that it’s got something half-blocking it and itching.

He can’t quite pass out now, not so deeply as he had been. He dozes instead, restless, his cacophony of bodily troubles always waiting to pounce on his attention. When he can’t doze, he drags himself out of bed.

Not far. Just to the threshold of his room, curled so close to the fire that he has to bat the odd spark away from the sticks bracing his leg. He lies there, and he watches John.

The other man goes in and out of the cave, coming back with backbreaking loads of snow to melt down for water. Firewood too, and sometimes, when the weather is better (less ill), game that the man skins and dresses right on the ground in the front of the cave. The bitter drafts roll over John’s uncaring back, but he will curse to himself about the way the half-frozen flesh sticks to his knife. Once he cut himself, and put his thumb up to his mouth and sucked at the cut like any other man.

He knows Chris is there. He can’t not, with the way he never comes into Chris’ side of the cavern until Chris has crawled and heaved himself back into the blankets, the way he only looks at the long gritty traces the stone leaves on Chris’ skin. But he only washes clean the scrapes, and pulls the tails of Chris’ shirt down over them.

John goes into the back of the cave and it’s then that Chris catches snatches of that other, higher, excitable voice. A dim light flickers out, like a red ribbon glimpsed in between the fingers: another fire. Maybe that’s why John goes in, to build it back up when it’s died down too far, because his son is too weak to do it himself. And that’s why Chris doesn’t see it other times, that firelight, even though his own fire must stay at least two logs thick or else the chill begins to eat away at the edges.

He’ll drop the odd comment about his son now, when he’s tending to Chris. A name: Stiles. An age: same as Allison’s. A complaint: playing endless games of checkers and fox and geese and nine men’s morris with pebbles, and then falling asleep and leaving the pebbles scattered for John to tread on underfoot. He makes Chris laugh, showing a bruise on his instep, laugh and blurt out a story about Allison and how she first learned to mend a bootsole.

Sometimes John will tend to chores in the main cavern. He’ll get out that bear hide and give it a working-over, rolling and rubbing it till it drapes easily over his fingers. Or he’ll scrub out the handful of pots they have, or take the largest of them and fill it with hot water and rinse out their clothes. Wash the bandages he uses for Chris, who still bleeds here and there, after he’s dragged himself back to his bed. When he’s done, he carries the pot outside to pour out the dirty water, with damp, faintly pinked sleeves clinging to the bunch of his forearms. The pot comes back empty.

Chris lets his forehead rest against the cold, rough stone, and closes his eyes. He waits till John comes and finds him that time, till the man’s half-disapproving cough grazes his cheek.

“Sometimes it’s like you _want_ to be stuck here,” John says, sliding his hands under Chris’ arms. He’s always warm, even coming from outside. His clothes, oh, they hold the chill, but his flesh is warm as the summer sun on your head, a warmth that draws you closer and then sets your head to spinning as lazily as dandelion fluff in the wind. “You have something to talk about? Chris?”

“No,” Chris says. 

He presses his face into the sweep of the man’s throat, brash and crude even with a sick man’s license. He can feel the slow push of blood through John’s veins, against his cheek; John goes quiet, just for a second, and then lets out a long, low sigh, and carries Chris back to the bed.

For once John’s ease falters, and he turns Chris out of his arms with a little carelessness, enough so that Chris’ bad shoulder knocks against the wall. Chris snaps his teeth together, on thin air, and before the click of them has faded away, John’s palm is blanketing his shoulder, soft and soothing. “Shit,” John says. “I—”

Chris unclamps his jaws and breathes in, and when he breathes out, the words go with the breath like trapped moths who’ve suddenly had the window opened to free them. “I told her once hunting’s not a legacy, it’s a disease. Used to think when I was young—but it’s not that people are stupid, or don’t know—they don’t know for _reasons_ , because they need the dark, a dark. They need something when they just—when things have gotten too—”

John’s fingers curve around his jaw. Loose but they touch his lips and he falls silent as John bends down, peers into his face, into his eyes, and the edge of John’s thumb could be in Chris’ mouth, close as it is on the rim of Chris’ lip and Chris feels hot and out of his skin, out of his _mind_. He’s got a dead wife and a family condemned for murdering another and the only brightness in his life is his daughter and even he knows that it’s time for her to leave. A head full of other people’s failures, hands that know how to twist those to breaking point, that is what she’ll leave to him when she goes, that and a village full of silent hatred. And he knows.

“You sleep up,” John says after a moment, pushing back. “Didn’t bring you along this long to have you get blood fever and burn yourself up now.”

Chris thinks to laugh. The sound crams up in his throat, and he shakes with the effort of swallowing it down, when he finally decides to. Because…because he thinks to live, he thinks he’ll see. Even now, when he knows, when it’d be better to close his eyes and huddle back and let the dark come down, bringing in its train all the things that others don’t know to look out for. It’s quieter, easier that way, when you don’t see what’s coming for you.

“Your son,” he says. “He’s not doing well?”

John’s almost turned away. He jars then, and the part of his face visible to Chris twists sharply. “You…heard. No, he’s—it’s too damned cold here. He’ll keep till spring, but he just isn’t—just like you, it’s just so slow.”

“You sure?” Chris says, turning his face into the pallet. “That he’ll keep?”

He hears the inhale over him and doesn’t look up. John stands there, running eyes over him, a rough, uneasy run that makes Chris’ shoulderblades twitch towards each other, wanting to hunch up, brace themselves. It’s cold, Chris thinks. Very cold, and suddenly the daze he’s always in breaks and his head rises up into the clear, too clear, reality. He bites the inside of his mouth and John’s boot scuffs to turn and yes, he wants to reach for the man. Yes, he wants to touch him. Yes, he wants him. He knows, and yet. Yes.

“He’s your son,” Chris says. “I know.”

John leaves without answering. Eventually, Chris pushes himself over onto his back. He looks at the stone over him, then turns back. There’s a piece of rock only a few inches away, wedge-shaped, with the thin end jagged enough so that when he palms it, he thinks if he squeezed enough—but he doesn’t. He turns the rock around, then uses it to scratch into the cave floor. _Allison_ , he writes, and then he stops to think.

_Remember_ and he scratches it out.

_Forgive_ and _sorry_ and _never meant_ , he doesn’t even start to write. He can’t tell himself he’s not a hypocrite, not these days, but he can still tell himself he knows his daughter well enough to know what will anger her. And he can still tell himself he’s honest enough, he knows when he’s only speaking to himself, and not her.

So it’s only her name he writes. He looks at it, hand wrapped around the rock. Once he pulls his arm in, till the rock almost touches his throat, that thin edge—and then he sighs, and pushes it away. He is clumsy and his wrist scatters dust over the last two letters of her name—the scratches are barely there anyway, so weak is he. And then he sighs, and knows, and he pushes more dust over the rest of her name.

He waits for John to come back.

* * *

He never sees it before that, to be clear. He never sees John wipe the blood off his skin and then put the bloody fingers up and lick them clean, never sees John steep his bloody bandages till they’re white again, and then take that steeping liquid and mix it into the broth that John holds back for himself and his son. Never sees John lean over his unconscious body, and push aside the dressing, and put soft warm lips to the wound to drink the blood fresh.

He never saw any of these things, and yet they burn through the backs of his eyes till the flames lick up as flashes of red and yellow at the edge of the world. His mouth dries out and his skin prickles and he shivers, curling his fists against his thighs, and his hands could be curling for the knives he no longer has or for the lean arms he never sees holding him down. Either, he could tell himself.

He could believe either. He’s a liar. His daughter has called him that. She’s since told him that she wishes she hadn’t, and she didn’t mean it, but he knows her and knows neither of those are true. Anyway, she’s right. He wishes that it hadn’t been the McCall boy to show her that, only because his daughter is beautiful and strong and smarter than all of them, and she should have had the truth for its own merits, and not for the sake of any boy, but that’s his fault, not hers.

So here is the truth: he never saw those things, and he knew to look for them. He did look for them, look and keep watch, and he didn’t see them. And yet he knows them to be true, as true as the truth that he never screamed once. Never even turned away, never even _wanted_ to.

* * *

It’s not John who comes to see him, when Chris wakes to a guttering fire and a chilly sweat pooling between his shoulders and at the small of his back and in the backs of his knees. It’s his son.

Big dark eyes, pale face, a haphazard quiff of hair with finger-marks still scrunched through it, John’s son squats by the side of Chris’ pallet. He’s dressed only in someone else’s shirt, baggy on him, with the hem pulled over his knees. His wrists are spindly, jutting from the cuffs, and his long bony fingers remind Chris of the way a bird’s feet tuck up into the belly when they fly, when he rolls them in front of Chris’ face. He doesn’t have a mark on him, and yet Chris knows without a doubt that the boy is deathly ill. Dying.

“It’s a neat trick, figuring out how to make him feel like he can’t do it even when you’re broken up and can’t get up to piss without help and couldn’t even kill a tick biting you,” John’s son says. He talks like a fever, even if he looks as cold as the snow piled up outside, with that white skin. “You’re good. You’re a lot better at this than anybody we’ve seen before, I think.”

“He was already, what do you mean?” Chris mutters, and then flicks his eyes up.

“Oh,” Stiles says, blinking, and then he smiles. The way he shifts in place, no one would take him for human. His father has that liquid ease to him, no strain when there should be, but that goes over so smoothly that you only wish you’d see it again. But Stiles, he is squatting with his hand over Chris’ face, and then he kneels with both hands behind him, and there is no in-between: he is two still poses slapped together and fear starts up in the gap that should have separated them, but that you never even saw. “But he’s good at that, not letting you see. But you’re a hunter, right?”

Chris shrugs. “Sometimes.”

Stiles finds this amusing and interesting, and then Stiles is cold and still and watchful, as emotionless as a hawk regarding a rabbit shaking under a bush. The boy seems to grow thinner as Chris watches, shadows crawling into the hollows of his cheeks and throat and just above his collarbone as the fire sputters behind him.

“What happened?” Chris stirs himself to ask, when the silence goes on too long. He may know, but he still finds himself bridling at the tension. The joke of being human, he supposes. “Silver in the water, or did they—”

One hand pushes into the folds of the shirt, pulling the collar open so that Chris can see dark marks on the unbroken skin of Stiles’ chest. Then it’s out and Stiles’ lips are curled to show his teeth. “Cut my heart out, kind of. Not all the way, obviously. But enough it’s not going to take game to get me out into daylight again. You know he tried. We tried a bear, even, before yours came along. It’s not good enough.”

“Wouldn’t be,” Chris agrees, and then he frowns, because still, he’s a hunter, and he thinks to think about what happens when you’re pushed beyond belief. “So what happened to—”

“He didn’t think. He was just mad, I mean, he came in on them doing it and—” Stiles is dizzying to listen to, if not to watch, defensive and proud and relishing even as he winces “—he was just thinking about stopping them getting me out, and then, when he thought and went back, because he couldn’t nurse me and stay on his feet, they were frozen. _Frozen_. It’s so ridiculously cold, you know, and it—blood doesn’t thaw out right, when it’s this cold. I don’t know, it just…they weren’t useful anymore.”

“I heard something like that once.” From his grandmother, Chris thinks. Or maybe an aunt, before they’d split away, not wanting to put up with his grandfather but not wanting to tear the family apart either. It runs in the family, Chris suddenly thinks. Not being cold enough, when it comes down to it, and then just making it all the worse.

Stiles raises his brows, curious, but doesn’t ask when Chris doesn’t volunteer more. He goes back to squatting, both hands down as he leans to look into Chris’ face.

“You’d let him,” he says.

Chris looks back at him. “How long were you here before I came along?”

“He wanted me to drink up, and then go and find somebody,” is how Stiles answers him, cool and sober. “Come back for him. He wouldn’t have lasted long enough. I knew that, he knew that.”

Chris nods, and they stare at each other. The fire gutters to coals, the glow barely visible through the flimsy folds of the shirt Stiles wears. A twilight gray descends over the cave, down to meet the cold seeping up from beneath. Stiles isn’t so obvious as to stare at the veins under Chris’ skin, or to lift his lips to show the sharpness of his teeth, but the hunger in his eyes gives him away. The hunger, and the will and intelligence behind it—mostly the will. He’d fight for the chance, fight the cold, frail and ill as he is.

But he sits, and watches Chris, who thinks…not of his daughter, as he should. And then he does, and the taste of recrimination, of the knowledge (not _fresh_ , no) that yet again he’s nothing a father should be, not in truth, that taste. It’s not so bitter, he thinks. Used to it or it’s too cold, he’s too numbed now to feel the bite. Either way he knows she’ll survive him. He only came on this trip because the money the furs brought in would have kept her a little longer with him, out of gratitude or guilt. He’s selfish, he’s always been.

When he heaves himself forward over his forearm, the skin over his shoulder splits fresh. He can feel it, under the bandages, slashes of heat against the gelid air, and then his forehead cracks against the rock floor as he overbalances and the point explodes into a wet veiling daze that makes the pain in his shoulder recede.

Stiles settles three feet away, crouched as before, eyes wide and watchful. He won’t risk an injury, Chris thinks, twisting to look over. Too hurt, he knows his limits, he won’t push a broken man, not one with those two sticks tied to his leg and a hunter’s mind. Not when he can stay back, and wait, and let Chris push himself up on staggering elbows, sucking the icy air in, and haul himself across the room. It’s the hawk in him Chris sees, waiting for carrion.

Chris’ leg twists sharply under him, when he half-forgets and rises up on the knee. The pain, he bites down on it and the clack of his teeth almost rises above the crest of the agony trembling through his thighs and back. His body from hips down slopes to the side, skewing him towards Stiles who retreats again. He pits out a breath, grits his teeth, wrenches himself to the other side and flops a little farther, nearly to the threshold now. His fingertips hurt and when he looks down, a drop of blood blurs his eye so that he can’t quite see the streaks they leave against the cave floor.

Another heave. One more push. He makes it, crippled as he is, forcing his weight to roll over his arm till momentum carries the rest of the way. His head bashes freely into the wall. Dazed, he sags down and can’t help turning away, to keep the raw, bleeding spot away from the rock.

He knots up over himself, head sliding down till it half-tucks under a crooked arm, and through the arch he can see the pale wash of Stiles’ shirt coming towards him. Then more blood trickles into his eyes. He blinks at it, then squeezes his eyes shut. Something touches his shoulder, ice-cold. Nudges aside the bandages, and he shakes at the touch but it’s a soft, slow ice, something that strokes rather than stabs, quieting the hot licks of pain from his reopened wounds. Almost tender. The blood in his eyes starts to cool and turn sticky, pulling at his eyelashes when he takes in a ragged, endless breath.

Cold, it’s very cold, and the cold spins itself around Chris like the most delicate of sheets, a fragile cocoon that nevertheless binds all his senses. He thinks he might sleep, just now, just—

His arm fails him. Still propped up, not quite letting the wall support him, and now it fails and he collapses the rest of the way. But it jars him enough. His head goes back and he sees Stiles’ blood-slicked mouth and the irregular dark marks on Stiles’ chest, one kinking just where you’d strike the sternum, if you didn’t know where to put the knife. Stiles is already drawn back, waiting, when Chris reaches down and twists free the stick tied to his leg. He’s already broken it and the splinters drive into his palm as he throws himself up against the wall. And he sees it in Stiles’ eyes, even as he raises the stick, even as an implacable, _burning_ grip seizes his neck and shoulder. Sees it.

Falling.

* * *

He saw it, less than an hour out. The road rises along the hill to overlook the village, and from there he could see the space behind his house and his daughter walking about in it. She had his gloves on, to give her a grip on the large knife she wielded in one hand and to protect the other from the brush she was cutting. Cutting and twisting, weaving a fence as she went, with rowan laced in every five feet and holly every ten. The mountain ash she keeps in a jar in the basket at her feet, to be dug into the earth with the poles she plants every so often to brace the fence against the wind.

But there’s a gap, where their property meets that of their neighbors, and it’s through that gap that her lover passes, with his wrapped bundle of food and his clumsy knot of dried cornstalks, braided after the fashion of their family as protection against the restless spirits who rise in the fall, when the harvest has been gathered in and the fields have no green growing things to press out dead things. She smiles at it, even as she puts her knife down and fixes the lopsided end, and he puts the food in her basket and then turns to help her with the fence. He holds the brush for her to cut and tie it, heedless of the splinters, and even from the hill Chris can see how the blood fails to run from his hands.

She’d told Chris that he had been safe, that the blood had come from others. That he hadn’t been bitten. In the fall, when they had stood against their family for the last time, and reaped the bodies instead of their grain, and the wolves—the wolves he’d allowed to _leave_ , blood-taste still in his mouth and the joke of righteousness clamped between his teeth, against the backwash of anger because it had been _right_ to do so. Because it had been just. Because the bodies who had fallen had been enough. Had been the end of it, the end of that life, and to kill again was to revive it but let the wolves go was to ensure the dead stayed dead.

But she’d lied. And…he had known. Known the whole time, and all he learned new by standing on that hill and looking down on his daughter was that he had known, whatever he had thought. He’d known that now he had to leave, and seeing her changed nothing, and so he had turned away.

* * *

His hands are tied. His shoulder burns, an uneven wavering fire that leaps when he tries to bend his arms to lift his hands higher than his breast. He can’t and lets them fall back into his lap, staring at the cord twisted around his wrists.

The man at his back goes still, hands poised on Chris’ thigh and shin, more cord wrapped round them and round the sticks that once again brace Chris’ leg. The sticks are unbroken, and the leg straight; he must have been unconscious for a while.

“I can’t let you go,” John says. He’s still so warm. They sit against the wall, Chris folded into the man, dried blood itching on the side of his face and he can feel John’s breath moistening it, teasing it, twitching the flakes trying to lift off his skin and yet he hears no hunger in John’s voice. “Stiles needs it. He’ll die. I can’t just give him my blood, even if—I would, but I don’t think even that will be enough. He needs it fresh and live.”

“I know,” Chris says, half-closing his eyes. The rope around his wrists prickles. He twists one hand, and listens to the low rasp of the fibers and watches the irritation bloom on his skin. “Just—”

John catches him under the jaw with one hand, though he’d turn his head to the man without that. Looks at him, with eyes almost cold for once. “That’s what he said. Stiles. He said you did it on purpose.”

Chris looks at him, past the coldness to the hesitation. Can’t not, hunter to the last, even with an iron grip on his throat and his pulse beating for it, for the press of the thumb and the glimpse of white teeth behind John’s thinned, stern lips. “You can’t keep me here either,” he says. “Not forever. I’m not getting any better. You know that.”

He’s older than he looks, Chris thinks. The warmth and the ease hide it; only youth should have that kind of confidence. But the way John looks at him then, not as if the man had expected better or different but as if the man had _wished_ for it, wished even though he’d known—that shows his age. Only the old look so bitter over what will never be.

“You’re going to beat your head in next time?” John asks, low, rough enough that Chris swallows and feels the ghost of it scratching his throat. “Tear your veins out, crawl into the snow and die?”

“You can’t let me,” Chris says.

John’s lips peel back and his breath whistles through his clenched teeth, their white sharp edges catching the light. He looks as if he’ll take Chris’ throat out with them alone, and—then he twists his head, presses it down against Chris’ shoulder and he is still so very warm. “Not much,” he mutters. “Not much. Never that much. You’re healthy enough, it shouldn’t have—shouldn’t—”

“But you can’t keep at just not much,” Chris says. “Not much won’t heal your son.”

“I _know_ ,” John hisses, and his head rises again. He rears a little, against the wall, something vicious rising in him. Chris braces himself and then John’s anger washes out of him and he only looks at Chris. A little curious, eyes bright in the way of a watching beast—he and his son look so alike then. “Why?”

Chris breathes in, slowly, till he can feel the chill the air brings into his lungs stretch all the way to the dull throb of his reset leg. “One way or the other, it ends the same,” he says, and then he throws himself forward.

He rises barely an inch before he’s crushed back against John’s chest. John curses, drags his bound wrists up nearly to his chin and Chris twists wildly, gets in a lucky slam of his shoulder up into John’s jaw before pain liquefies his right leg and turns his shoulder and the whole left side of his body to unbending iron.

John coughs, shakes his head. His grip on Chris’ wrists tightens unmercifully, but his arms drop and if Chris were whole, if he had the will to, he might have turned that into a slip out of the other man’s grip. But Chris lets the haze drop over him, listens to the echo of his thick, panting breath in his ears, and John wraps an arm around his waist and draws him back.

“No,” John snaps. “No, no, you have a daughter—”

“Leave her to me,” Chris hisses, forgetting himself. Then he wrenches his head, disappointed. He senses the shift in John, that catch in the man’s anger, and desperate, bashes his head back into the other man.

His skull connects, but then it slides, just a glancing blow, no solidity to it. Slipping along the curve of John’s head as John grunts and blows blood-hot breath over him and then _cold_. The middle of it, the heart of the heat and it’s like ice-water. Not the shock of it at the beginning, but after, when the bite has faded and there is only the growing sweep of cold sinking in, sinking you. John’s teeth in his throat.

It’s cold. Chris is surprised. He’d always thought—always heard—that it’d be fire. But it’s cold. Cold and quiet.

John’s lips draw across his skin, pulling at it a little. Gentle, no need for force now, and it’s the same with the hands he slides down Chris’ belly, down past any excuse for decency, for only holding Chris down, warm firm palms against Chris’ trembling. “This it?” he murmurs, and his fingers slide towards Chris’ cock. “This? This what you’re looking for, just this to go with you? This what you’re making me do, before you go and kill yourself?”

Chris shudders. He can’t help himself. He’s dizzy, so dizzy that at first he doesn’t realize they’ve moved to lie on their sides. He worms up against John, seeking out warmth, and John allows it, takes him up. Mouths at his neck where the blood is chilly as it cools and sticks, arches up at Chris’ back, curls fingers around Chris’ cock so that Chris almost thinks something of himself is drawing in that heat from John.

“No,” John snorts, answering himself. There’s no doubt in his voice, and no hesitation in the way that he grips Chris. “No, not that easy. You wouldn’t have—”

“ _You_ wouldn’t have,” Chris hisses. His eyes close against the light that bursts behind his eyelids, as a thumb rubs over the head of his prick. He hurts, he does, burning all through him and then lips press to his neck again and he knows what comes with them, that promise of cool silence, and he can’t help but groan. “No, not even if I’d asked. But your son, John. He’s going to _die_ —just leave my daughter—that’s all…”

John tightens around Chris. Hands on Chris’ cock and wrists, thigh holding down Chris’ hip, a shoulder digging into Chris’ back. It hurts and the hurt is red-hot and Chris winces. Then lets himself exhale, falling back into it, letting the heat mount on him.

“Damn you,” John says lowly. “Damn you, you’ll just keep on—keep you _from_ that, that’s what you came for, damn you—”

And just when it’s unbearable, when it’s like being in the heart of a furnace—then the cool comes again. Sinking into his throat, then ribboning out from there, long sweet strands of cold that wrap through Chris’ bones and slowly, softly still their shuddering. He exhales and the whole of his body loosens, as if he’s fallen back into a cradle of snow. And it comes on him so gently, his release. He doesn’t hear a thing.

* * *

Chris doesn’t hate his daughter. Or John, or John’s son. And now, at this point, he doesn’t think he even hates his family. They did what they did but so did he—he made his choices, he knew. And now…he always knew they were the kind of choices he’d have to live with, lie with. He resented them once, for it, but not anymore. There is no point to that. It was always only going one way, and he always knew that.

But he is surprised, at the end of it all. How much he _wants_ it.

Then again, maybe he shouldn’t be. He knew where he was going, and why.

* * *

Slow. Everything about it is slow. The drag of someone’s lips against his throat, the sluggish shift of them against him, the heavy lift of his eyelids as he gazes down at the head tucked against his shoulder. Russet hair, with a broad hand cupping over it, holding it as someone sighs against the back of his ear.

“Take it easy,” John says, not to him. “Fast and you’ll waste it, and we can’t. Not a drop.”

Stiles murmurs and his teeth rock where they’ve fastened in Chris. A little pain sparks up, enough to make Chris blink, but then the hand slips across Stiles’ head and cheek and then rubs a thumb against Chris’ skin, pressing up against the lips nursing him, nudging away the ache and Chris lets his head drift back, lets himself slow down. Slow and soft and even John can’t keep him warm now. He should—

His mouth is open. Hanging open, he knows, because fingers push up against his lip and close it some of the way. Not all, because something rounds into his mouth, yielding, and a trickle of heat spreads across his tongue. But not fast—no, it’s as unhurried as the rest, the warmth, and so it doesn’t jar him, doesn’t wake him. He closes his eyes again.

* * *

Her father comes back. She knew he would, no matter what he did out there in the woods. He told her so—early, with a stack of furs. And he keeps his promises, even when he doesn’t want to.

That’s why, when he comes back, she’s not waiting in the house. Not in bed, where Scott is still sleeping, nor in the kitchen where she can watch the yard in safety, with the warmth of the hearth at her back. No, she waits for her father out in the cold, just inside the fence of rowan and holly and mountain ash, of all the woods that work against the dark things in the night, with a crossbow in one hand and a long iron rod in the other.

“Allison,” he says, drawing to a stop. The wagon of furs behind him, furs so white that they glow as pearls glow, under the moonlight. White as her father’s face, rising up from the same clothes—she blinks roughly—the same clothes he wore to leave her, mended here and there but she’d still know them. “Allison. I told you—”

“I’m on this side,” she says, proud that her voice shakes only a little, and she lays the hand holding the rod on the top of the fence.

He looks at her, and then lifts his chin a little and _looks_ at her, and it’s strange, the way he looks at her. Steady and unblinking, unflinching, and she forgets herself a little and smiles to see him so much stronger. But then his eyes widen and he flinches, twisting to the side, and _then_ she understands. Why he looked at her like that, like the sight of her face no longer reminds her of blood and death and loss. Like she’s not his daughter, the reason why he’s let himself be driven to plunge alone into the woods in the dead of winter, but something else entirely.

“I brought,” he says, faltering, wholly her father again. His gaze shies from her as he gestures towards the furs. “No need for them. It’s—”

“It’s still cold,” Allison says. He looks sharply at her and she inhales just as sharply, her hands tightening on wood and iron. And then, holding his eyes, she steps forward till the fence creaks against her. “Even if you don’t feel it now. You should come in.”

“You know what I _am_ ,” he spits at her, savage, his head jerking forward even as he forces the rest of his body back. “I taught you. I told you—”

Allison nods slowly. Lays her hand on the fence, presses it down. Leans over it and looks at her father, what’s become of her father. “I knew. When you left me behind—you did, you know you did. You left me on purpose, and then you thought I’d let you—you’re my _father_. If you really thought I’d leave you, just because—then why did you come back?”

He poses himself to go, and yet he stays. His lips twist and the moonlight limns the long, long sharp canines they reveal, and then he ducks his head again. “To see,” he mutters, before looking up. “If you’d stayed, after all. I couldn’t…you’re my daughter. I had to know.”

Then his eyes go behind her. Allison straightens, then decides not to turn, to look at the man she knows is standing on the threshold of the house. She looks at her father instead, till he meets her eyes again, and then she lowers the crossbow. Thrusts the rod into the fence, then turns it so it catches in the woven brush, then pulls it apart to make a break, one large enough for a man to pass through.

“You knew about Scott,” she says.

Her father nods. His eyes flick behind her again and she hears the sound of something crossing the grass—four feet, not two. Her hand tightens around the crossbow again, before she bends and drops it entirely, letting it rest bolt-down against the fence.

“Then you knew,” she says, straightening again, as her father comes nearer. Slowly, so achingly slowly, but still, he comes. He’s her father, he’ll never want to leave her. She’s always known that. And she knows—she’s learned this, all these nights waiting for him—she knows, that leaving will never be what she asks of him. “I don’t care. What you taught me—I don’t _care_. You’ve come home, so come _in_.”

“Allison,” her father says, voice bunched as if to spring out at her. She thinks he might push her back, he even raises his hand—and then something passes over him, something that takes the heat out of him. He lowers his hand. “You did stay.”

She smiles at him. “Come in and warm yourself.”

Another moment he hesitates, and then he sighs, and bows his head, and steps through the fence. And she can hold herself no longer, throwing herself into his arms, forcing the wolf at their knees to move away.

He’s not so cold, she’s surprised to find. No, he’s _warm_.

* * *

Chris and his daughter go into the house, with a wolf leading ahead of them. Chris is last and he turns on the threshold, looking out across the yard. The two at the broken fence look back at him and he stares till John nods, and takes his son by the shoulder, and walks on. His daughter to him, that’d been all he’d asked for.

He watches them walk onto the next house, and up to the door. And then, as they knock at it, he turns away, and goes into his own house.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The wooden stake had _some_ folklore precedent, but you find people driving iron rods into corpses more often, and for a variety of reasons besides stopping vampires. It supposedly was the best way to prevent ghosts and witches from walking, too.
> 
> Anyway, vampires! I wanted to write something that was a little less reliant on mainstream tropes, since even trying to subvert them or do them tongue-in-cheek has already been done to death. This might remind some people of Scandi-noir, but actually I've never seen _Let the Right One In_ and I was more directly inspired by Algernon Blackwood's _The Glamour of the Snow_ and vampire stories of that era.


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